1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a location search engine field, and specifically, to a natural language based location query system and a method therefore, a keyword based location query system and a natural language based and keyword based location query system and the method thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the development of mobile communication networks, especially the beginning eve of 3G in China, local search, closely linked to people's daily life, will have a big market in the near future.
With the rapid development of technology and economy, people's life or work becomes more and more global. When enter a strange environment, you maybe need information about a hotel, car rental or medical help. More specifically, you even need to find something in your new residence, such as a plumber, a restaurant, an accountant or a florist.
Therefore, location search plays an important role. However, a user generally has to select the result he or she needs from a plurality of results after the user submits a query request in the current search engine.
Particularly, a large amount of time is required to scroll through mobile search results when a user performs a location information search using a mobile phone because of the small screen and the limitation phone keypads. So the traditional search engine can not provide a search result of high accuracy and efficiency. First, a user prefers to query information more freely, and secondly, mobile users prefer to access information precisely and concisely.
Some of the existing search engines provide local information services to mobile users. For example, Google's local search allows a user to search stores and business information in a specific area. Yahoo! local search can be used for finding restaurants, entertainment venues, and businesses. Those two search engines employ the same search mechanism with respect to mobile users and network users. Therefore, the local search results for mobile users are exactly the same as the search result with respect to local search on a computer.
Mobile Info Search can retrieve all kinds of information related to location automatically from the contents of page, such as company's name and address. The information is associated with a map and is provided to a user to search for location information based on keyword search.
The Answers Anywhere Mobile is a middleware platform, which provides a user with a wireless apparatus direct access to data service through interacting modes such as SMS, MMS and voice. Moreover, it provides advanced natural language and context understanding technology. Moreover, some of the existing patents focus on the method of providing natural language processing in information service systems.
In the U.S. Pat. No. 2002161587A1, a method of providing natural language processing in a location-based service system is provided. The system can receives a voice request and generate a response based on the geographic location of said remote terminal.
The Chinese patent CN 1466367A presents a mobile human-knowledge interactive system and method. A user can query multi-domain knowledge (e.g. weather information, traffic information) through mobile phone. It has two advantages: (1) The system allows a user to query through natural language; (2) The system can identify and correct misspellings in user queries.
Although mobile users prefer to query location information freely and accurately, the search preferences are varied from users. Firstly, a user may search local information indirectly (e.g., using the word “something to eat” to replace the word “restaurant”). Secondly, different users may prefer natural language queries or keyword-based queries differently. Thirdly, a user query can be a compound sentence. Fourthly, a user query may be fuzzy. Finally, when a user queries, he or she may add or lose some characters, even there are some semantic errors in the query.
Therefore, the existing technology has the defects as the follows.
As to the situations above, the drawbacks of the existing solutions are summarized as follows.
Google, Yahoo and Mobile Info Search are serviced as keyword-based search engines and cannot process natural language queries.
Although Answers Anywhere provides natural language queries, it cannot process indirect queries and compound sentences flexibly. Moreover, the capacity of fizz processing and semantic error analysis is very weak.
Patent US 23002161587A1 only provides an English natural language interface, but it only considers parts of speech and doesn't consider richer semantic information. So it is limited in processing fuzzy queries and user queries with semantic errors.
Patent CN 1466367A is a Chinese question-answering system, and it cannot process compound sentences, keyword queries and queries with semantic errors.